Personal computers (PCs) are increasingly being used for purposes far different from the standard word-processing and data-handling modes. PCs today are increasingly being used for communication purposes as well as the standard computing purposes. One such communication purpose involves communication via email, and specifically the incorporation of digital images in an email message.
Digital images can be stored on a computer and can take different paths into the computer. For example, digital cameras are now being widely used by consumers. In use, the digital cameras record and store digital images. These digital images can be moved from the more limited storage area of the camera to the storage area on a PC or other computing device. These storage areas are rapidly increasing in size, such that storage of a very large quantity of digital images is possible without affecting the operability of the computing device. As another example, standard photographs can be scanned into the computing device, thus converting the photograph into a digital image. Whatever the path into the computer, the user of the computer frequently desires to share the images with others.
Email offers a convenient and inexpensive method of communication. For example, a user can target a great number of people with a single outgoing message, in contrast to regular mail. In the past, however, the email context presented certain drawbacks in use. One method of sending digital images along with an email message involves sending the images as attachments. In this method, one or more individual images are attached to the email as additional files. To view the images, the person receiving the email message must double-click or otherwise open each attached file. To view any of the other images attached, the user must repeat the same procedure. In this method, then, people are required to open the files one at a time, and view them one at a time. This type of method is less than convenient and is not intuitive for novice computer users. Another problem with this method is the size of the attached files. Digital image files can be quite large. If they are not otherwise compressed in some fashion, the number of digital image files that can be attached is limited. This limitation is often imposed by the servers handling the email messages. Another method that can be used is to scroll through an email in the preview pane to view multiple picture attachments. This requires the use of the preview pane.
Another method used to include digital images within an email message is to copy the image into the message body. The main problem with this method is the formatting issues that arise. Using this method, any text that the sender includes is not associated with a particular image. Thus, if the sender includes text with a certain image, and then later moves that image within the email message body, the text will not move with the image unless the sender also separately moves the text. Moreover, including images of different sizes and orientations presents the receiver with an untidy and unpleasing view of the images. Also, any resizing of the images must be done on an image-by-image basis, making the process cumbersome and time-consuming. The basic problem with this method is that including images in-line within the message body is very cumbersome and results in an unpleasing view of the images. Any improvements in the view are cumbersome to effect. The file size is also large in this case as well, just as with the first method described above.
It would be desirable to provide to the computer user an opportunity to easily include and send digital images within the body of an email message. It would be desirable if this opportunity allowed the sender to easily format the presentation, including the layout, size, orientation and background effects, and to associate text with each image, if desired. It would also be desirable to compress the images for the sender. Therefore, there exists a need to improve the sender and receiver experience in the use of digital images within an email message.